Lesson 92 • April-2

Practice Instructions

Purpose: To experience the light of strength in you, which will reveal to you the miracles that are always there.

Longer: Two times—morning and evening, for twenty minutes.

This exercise is another meditation, like you've been doing since Lesson 41. That's why the instructions are so brief—it's assumed that you know how to do this. Here, you try to sink to that deep place in your mind where light and strength meet, and where "your Self stands ready to embrace you as Its Own" (9:2). Seek this place and try to rest in the peace that waits for you there. Your sinking should not be all your own effort. "Let yourself be brought" (10:2) there; ask the truth to lead you there (this was emphasized in Lessons 69, 73, and 91). While going there, remember to draw your mind back from wandering as needed, and to carry an attitude of confidence, desire, and determination.

Frequent reminders: As often as you can.

Repeat the idea, recognizing you are being led away from the body's blindness to the light of true sight, in which miracles are seen. Do it with a mindset of "I'm preparing myself for the evening practice period." In this way, you can use the day to prepare yourself for a true holy instant at the end of the day.

Commentary

The goal of this lesson seems to me to be finding "the meeting place of self and Self," as it is put in 10:4. "It is God's strength in you that is the light in which you see" (3:1). There is Something in me that is as far beyond what I think I am as the sun is beyond a match. There is an unimaginable vastness in me that, by these lessons, I am being led to discover. In the two twenty-minute practice periods today—the morning and evening "meetings" as they are referred to (11:2)—I am attempting to bring self to Self, to bring the match to the sun. I am trying to open the door to infinity within myself.

This strength within me is mighty beyond the telling of it. It is "constant, sure as love, forever glad to give itself away" (8:1). Within me, my Self "stands ready to embrace [me] as Its Own" (9:2). I am a triple-A battery standing next to a nuclear power plant, about to plug in to endless power that ever renews itself. No, that image is too cold; it lacks the "embrace" spoken of. I am a tiny, fearful child, about to be swept up in the arms of the universal, endlessly compassionate and omnipotent Father/Mother/God.

I think that perhaps the way a very young child sees its parents—huge, vast, all—knowing, totally worthy of trust, able to do anything—is perhaps a reflection of the truth of our relationship to God, and even our relationship to our own true Self.

I find this lesson enormously encouraging. It tells me strength is the truth about me (4:7). Those are words worth many repetitions! Truth gives its strength to everyone who asks, in limitless supply (5:4). This light, this strength, "does not change and flicker and go out" (7:5). "No one can ask in vain to share its sight" (8:2). As a later lesson tells us, "No one can fail who seeks to reach the truth" (W-pI.131.Heading). It does not matter how often I have tried and failed, or how long it has been since I have had a flicker of light in my mind, or how weak and puny seem the efforts of my heart; I cannot fail. I have the strength of God in me, and it will lead me to where I want to go.

I come to the practice periods today with trust in that strength. God's strength. My strength. I come to allow, just for this brief period, my self to meet my Self. I come to leave the darkness behind and let true vision, in the light, dawn upon my mind. I care not that it may not seem to last. I care not that my mind might seem dark before and dark after; for this instant, let me open to the light, and let it begin its work of leading me home. I bring my doubts, my fears, my open disbelief and expose them to this light, and in the light they disappear, and my heart floods with joy. I am being "led away from darkness to the light where only miracles can be perceived" (11:3).